Heart Essays

In this remarkable audiobook of days, John Hildebrand charts the overlapping rings - home, town, countryside - of life in the Midwest. Like E. B. White, Hildebrand locates the humor and drama in ordinary life. In these wry, sharply observed essays, the Midwest isn’t "The Land Time Forgot", but a more complicated (and vastly more interesting) place where the good life awaits once we figure exactly out what it means.

The Walter Brueggemann Library brings together the wide-ranging and enlivening thought of popular biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann over his storied career. Each volume collects previously published work on a biblical theme that has deeply informed Brueggemann's scholarship.

A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life by Pat Conroy is a new nonfiction collection of letters, interviews, and magazine articles spanning Conroy's long literary career, supplemented by touching pieces from the beloved author's many friends. The book collects some of Conroy's most charming pieces of short nonfiction, many of them addressed directly to his listeners, with his habitual greeting: "Hey, out there".

Provocative, thoughtful, beautiful, these essays have a directness and humanity that connects with our era.

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.